The third edition of the Humble Indie Bundle features five games from just one …

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Given the success of the first twoHumble Indie Bundles, it's no surprise that there's now a third. What is surprising though, is how the latest iteration of the promotion has been structured. Instead of gathering games from several developers, we now have the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle, which focuses exclusively on the Finnish developer behind the action co-op hit Trine. The bundle includes not only the studio's hits, but also a now-cancelled prototype and an upcoming release.

Ars had the chance to speak with Frozenbyte CEO Lauri Hyvärinen about how the bundle came to be and just what those who purchase it can expect.

The bundle launched a little over 24 hours ago and offers five different games: Trine, Shadowgrounds, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, a prototype of the cancelled Jack Claw, and the upcoming Splot. More than 80,000 bundles have already been sold, earning over $400,000. And that's just in one day. Like previous bundles, those who purchase can pay whatever they want, and are able to divide that amount amongst both the developer and various charities.

Hyvärinen told Ars that Frozenbyte had been looking at doing a pay-what-you-want sale for some time, but the technical challenges seemed too daunting.

Humble Frozenbyte Bundle

"In December 2010 the second Humble Bundle launched, and at the same time we tried to learn about their technical solutions and we were absolutely amazed by the amount of technical awesomeness on the site, and also were worried by the fact that it seemed to require too much programming and Web development skills, and we didn't have any spare programmers from our development teams," he explained.

"We also realized that while the Humble Indie Bundles were doing absolutely amazing in terms of sales and user satisfaction, there were many poorly executed pay-what-you-want campaigns, which failed to raise any significant attention. So, we thought to ask the Humble Bundle guys if they would be interested in cooperating with us, and John and Jeff over there were really enthusiastic about the idea. I think it was a great match for both of us. We began throwing ideas in late December and gradually worked on those plans until the launch."

One of the biggest selling points of previous bundles has been the multiplatform aspect, as the majority of games can all be played on PC, Mac, and Linux. So the Frozenbyte bundle represents a number of firsts. It's the debut of Trine on Linux and the first time that the Shadowgrounds games have been available for Macs.

Of the five games in the bundle, only three are fully finished products. In fact, Jack Claw is actually a prototype of a game that the studio had worked on for three years before being forced to cancel it.

Concept art from Jack Claw

"It never saw the light of day before because although we had attracted a lot of publisher interest, eventually it became clear that the publishers who had faith in the game didn't have the money, and the publishers who had the money didn't have faith in us as a team," Hyvärinen said of the game. "Game developers typically have a lot of prototypes or concepts that are developed to a certain stage, and then abandoned. We think it'd be cool to have more of these out there."

"We actually hope that the community would have an interest in developing the game further," he continued. "To that end we've released the source code and will try to provide support to any projects that spring up. A little bit like crowd-sourcing I guess, although it's still early days to see how everything turns out eventually. There seems to be a lot of interest in the game, though."

Bundle purchasers will also be preordering one of the studio's upcoming games, Splot, which Hyvärinen describes as a a cute physics-puzzle-platformer. It will also be available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Once the game is available on Steam, users will get a code for that as well. It's expected to be released sometime this summer.

As the only developer to be the sole focus of a Humble Bundle, the team at Frozenbyte was naturally a bit nervous at first, but despite a few technical issues Hyvärinen is pleased with the reaction. At least so far.

"Humble Frozenbyte Bundle seems to be going very well already, but of course we won't celebrate before it's all done and the very last support requests are handled properly," he told Ars. "We are really happy about the current sales though, and it's going to help us a lot in going forward. We've basically been self-funding our games for a year or two, but recently we had to delay Trine 2 to late summer 2011 instead of spring to ensure it's as great as it can be, and that caused a little bit of financial worry—luckily the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle sales have been so good that I think we'll be good on that front."